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Jeff Thompson:
I’m excited to introduce Paul Schroeder. He is currently with Aira and formerly with the AFB and I am not reading his long bio. He’s gonna tell us all about himself so without further ado I’m giving it over to you, Paul.
Paul Schroeder:
Hey, thank you. Thank you very much. I’m very excited. Sorry to interrupt your lunch but please keep eating. I want to help maybe spend a minute reminding us why we’re here which might be about data and controls as I said before lunch. Hopefully it’s a little more than that, but that’s a critical part of it I admit. I’ve sort of titled these remarks Risk and Resistance. Let me first say this: I am a proud product of education from a residential school for the blind. Assistance from Count Them Too, vocational rehabilitational agencies. Training from a community based organization. My career and life have been built with the help of consumer organizations. Access Tech developed the first too countless to name. University trained teachers and professionals and countless blind peers from whom I have learned a great deal. With that foundation, I stand here. A braille reading, cane using, tech loving, child rearing … successful daughters, I’ll tell them about you if you ask me … tax paying …for 35 years or more … successful blind person.
Paul Schroeder:
And I’m glad to take this opportunity to thank you and all of who you represent, for your support. I wouldn’t be here, enjoying this life and career, rich in experience, without you. All of you have contributed to this community. Thank you very much. I wanna talk a little bit about bubble wrap. You can learn a lot from bubble wrap and the way people treat to it. Really satisfying to pop, right? I mean come on, you get those packages, I dunno, maybe you’re not like me, but I you know, tell my wife I’m taking them down to the trash and I sneak out in the garage and I just stand there popping bubbles for a while. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes I twist it and get multiples going, sometimes I stand on it, jump, you know. That’s kinda fun. You get the idea right? Playing with bubble wrap. By the way, kind of a weird twist, the first time I ever encountered bubble wrap, was a kid and it came in the talking book record container. Yep, those of you who are young, records are these round things. They spin on a turntable. And so they had bubble wrap in there and sorry National Library Service, I spent a lot of time popping the bubbles so it probably wasn’t that useful when it got sent back.
Paul Schroeder:
The other day, this does have a point other than reminiscing about bubble wrap, which I could do. I was telling my wife that I was coming to talk to this group and she said, “What are you gonna talk about?” and I said well, I wanna talk a little bit about risk and she always says the same thing when I mention risk. She says, “But safely, right?”. And I said, of course and she reminded me that she always used to muse about wrapping our children in bubble wrap. Our two daughters. So, of course my parental role was to bring the challenge, the fun, and maybe a little risk to parenting my daughters lives. By the way, relevant to know this for the next part of this story, my wife is sighted. Both of our daughters have been in the Emergency Room and had stitches more than once and I was never the parent on duty by the way. So there. A little bit of risk in life is a good thing.
Paul Schroeder:
One of my favorite professionals in this field, he worked with me at the American Foundation for the Blind for a good while. I love this story or quite that he would sometimes tell us. He worked with parents a lot and one of the things that he’d always hear parents say, right, and we hear this. “I’m so afraid that my bling child will get hurt” and he always said, “I’m so afraid they won’t”. Risk and challenge are so important to a life of success I have found. And yeah, it may be good to be safe and make sure that you’re not taking undue risk, but you know what? A little bit of challenge, a little bit of risk taking is a good thing and as I often talk to blind kids, I encourage them, sometimes outside of the earshot of their professional and parents: go ahead, take a little risk, challenge yourself a little. If you get hurt, you’re gonna survive.
Paul Schroeder:
I don’t usually share this part with the kids, but if you get a group of blind people together, who grew up blind, and maybe some even who didn’t, chances are they’re all gonna have a story about driving a car blind. And I’m guessing most of you in this room who are blind, have that story, some version of it. I remember when my dad … I have two older brothers who grew up sighted … and as I got to be closer to 16 my dad said, “You know, I’m gonna take you out and we’re gonna go into a parking lot and I’m gonna show you how to drive, cause you should have that same experience as your brothers” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him my friends had already done it. Dad went out driving. May or may not have been sober at the time, cause why would you let a blind person drive if you’re sober?
Paul Schroeder:
Okay, that’s probably not a good risk so I don’t really advise it. But you know what, that’s the life we lead sometimes. You take some chances, and I’ve been blessed and fortunate that the injuries from my risks have been minimal, but the joy has been great.
Paul Schroeder:
So, moving in from bubble wrap, I wanna talk a little bit about the sort of twin monsters that many of us who are blind, grow up with and have whether or not we lost sight as a kid or as an adult. The twin monsters of No You Can’t and Boy Are You Amazing. They’re both pretty bad. I grew up blind. I lost my sight as a wee infant and so most surprisingly for anybody in this room, I heard No, and You can’t do that, a lot as a kid. And to this day, I physically recoil when somebody tells me I can’t do something or Don’t go that way. If you tell me not to go that way, I will do it just because you told me not to. Even if it’s gonna take me off a cliff. Fortunately that hasn’t quite happened yet but that’s my visceral response to being told, “No, you can’t go that way”. And I don’t know if that’s necessarily healthy, but I think it’s important to resist the No. Being told No, and accepting that as something we should live with.
Paul Schroeder:
One of the things that … as you know I work for Aira, and I’ll tell a couple of stories about Aira as we talk, just because it’s been relevant to my life now and I think it does have something important to offer. It’s a service of streaming video through a camera and outside agent seeing through the camera and can provide information about visual stuff … talk to Neal about his story by the way. So I was talking with our agent trainers, and they said something about agents saying no, and I said, “You know, we should probably not do that, cause at least in my case, if an agent says no, I’m gonna end up doing it.” It’s bad advice, it’s not helpful, if they’re trying to provide information about something I shouldn’t do, you’ve gotta find some other way, cause that’s gonna get Paul to just do his recoil and be irascible.
Paul Schroeder:
The other monster, of course, is the You’re Amazing, alright. Now being told no is quite harmful and destructive, but being told you’re amazing for accomplishing the most routine activity or task, is also destructive. All of you know this. It definitely does not help build resilience or grit. I always resisted that praise as a kid growing up. I still hate it to this day when people say, “Ah it’s amazing what you people do”. I have all kinds of smart aleky things as many of us probably do, to say, and sometimes I felt like I should try to be nicer to people and then I realize, you know what? I was supposed to get nicer with age and that really hasn’t happened so maybe it still will, but I just find that frustrating.
Paul Schroeder:
This whole, You’re Amazing thing, is a challenge and it’s one that I know everybody in this room works to resist and please make sure that you do. If you’re told you’re amazing all the time you’re probably a Millennial for one thing, and the second thing is … I have two of them but they don’t believe they’re amazing, I mean they are amazing but I don’t tell them that … The other thing of course to resist that can also be annoying right. Because sometimes people do do amazing things and sometimes you should accept praise and I’ve had to learn that from time to time that once in a while it’s actually okay to accept someone’s praises. But I always did like, you know a lot of things are attributed to Winston Churchill, I didn’t know whether he really said them all, but one of my favorites that he apparently did say about one of his colleagues, is “He’s a modest man with much to be modest about”. So I worry, I want to make sure I don’t fall into that category.
Paul Schroeder:
I’ll say this a couple of times. All of you have been granted with the authority of a high position and you have the expectations that come with that leadership and the responsibility that accompanies your role. With all of that, you may not do what you can to resist those twin monsters of No and Amazing.
Paul Schroeder:
Now, I wanna move to … this all sort of weaves together … and in this next little bit I wanna talk about is resisting limits. And it’s all really tided into that being told No and You’re amazing, and things like that. The low expectations that sometimes our society has for people who are blind unfortunately. And it took me a while to put my blindness into perspective for me. I was one of these kids who rebelled and resisted a lot of what I probably now realize were not wise decisions on my part. I would walk around without a cane for example, and I am totally blind. And I’m not that god at that echo thing, whatever it’s called. Not the smartest decision I’ve made in my life but that was part of my struggle against negative concepts and what I considered to be inflated recognition.
Paul Schroeder:
But I remember being moved and changed in my philosophical outlook and helped in my understanding by the first time that I attended a National Federation of the Blind Convention back in 1984 in Phoenix. Yep, that old, there it is. I remember reading through some of the philosophy and the articles by Dr. tenBroek and Dr. Jernigan and I thought, here is a group that’s, this is what I’ve been trying to say an articulate but also understand that these tools that make me independent are great things to have and great things to use and while I can resist the low expectations of society of people who are blind, I also nee dot endorse and accommodate the tools that will make me and allow me to be more independent using that as a tool and so thanks to NFB for that, it made a huge difference in my life as a young person coming out of college at that point.
Paul Schroeder:
I later found value in working with the disability community. First in an office in Ohio for people with disabilities. Yay Ohio. Any Ohioans in the room?
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Yo.
Paul Schroeder:
OH. [crosstalk] These you go. Thank you. Thank you very much. And then with the American Council of the Blind and the American Foundation for the Blind where I learned from my peers how to shape a world that embraces accessibility. Where we live, where we work, where we play. To address those challenges and to shape an environment that was more inclusive, more welcoming and frankly more able to allow us to thrive and be independent as individuals with disabilities. I am so lucky to live in this time of policy progress and technology advancement. I have directly benefited from and in some ways, tried to contribute to these policies.
Paul Schroeder:
In my lifetime, Section 504, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the American with Disabilities Act, Text book Accessibility, the Video and Communications Accessibility Act, to name a few have made a huge difference to the way I’ve been educated, to the way I have lived and to the enjoyment of the life that I have been given too. Now as I said top you earlier, I was someone who resisted services and resisted programs. Not always for the best reasons, but that was part of my life, part of what shaped me to where I am today and so I remember at age 21 when I didn’t have job prospects, finally succumbing to apply for and receive SSI and a little less than a year later, I was very proud for me when I closed it down and never went back to that service. I’m glad those programs are there but they weren’t programs that I wanted to pursue because I felt that I could do better and that I had different opportunity in life and so I remember to this day, actually, social security had accused me, or decided that I had been overpaid for various reasons, and so after a lot of debate and appeal and struggle, I wrote them a check for $2.22. And that’s what we had come down to. That was my amount of my overpayment and in the memo on that check, I wrote full and final payment for overpayment and they said we can’t accept that with an endorsement. So I had to write it again. I don’t know how much you cost Social Security to pursue this but it was clearly not a great use of their dollars. Part of this resistance and risk and all of that.
Paul Schroeder:
For me, curiosity has been a really big part of my life and I’ve been lucky that for the most part, people have accepted that and even nourished it. But Goldilocks and I share a little bit of a criminal past. I kind of liked doing breaking and entering. Not into bears houses I guess, but as a kid I figured out that there are ways to get into places I wasn’t supposed to go. It goes back to being told no. It clearly was a problem for me. The statute of limitations are all gone so I can talk about it now. But I first learned that at the residential school that I attended in New York state, breaking into one of the buildings on campus. I don’t know why it was still there. I was a condemned building, they weren’t using it, but it was a whole lot of fun to break into and to wander around and learn early on the skills of getting into places you weren’t supposed to. That was a moderately useful skill at different times in my life, but probably one that it’s good that I’ve moved on from as a skill set. Although I don’t know that we have enough blind criminals to honor in this world so, maybe we … I’m not suggesting you teach that … what made me … as I said, fortunately my parents nourished and supported my curiosity as did my teachers … maybe not the breaking and entering part, but the rest of it they did.
Paul Schroeder:
My parents knew relatively little about blindness, like many parents. The y didn’t come with a book of skills, particularly in the 60’s it wasn’t as easy to find information as of course it is today thanks to a lot of work that people have done. But we were fortunate, having been in this field a long time now I know what happened for me was unusual and rarely happens for people who lose their sight. I had an ophthalmologist who said when my parents asked him, “What do we do with this blind child? Do we keep him in the crib?” And he said, “No absolutely not. If I come to the house and find out he’s in the crib I’m taking him out. You treat him like his two older, sighted brothers and he’ll be fine” and they did. And I was luck for that advice that came at an important part of parents’ lives who really didn’t know what they were going to be doing and that generally speaking, that was the way they handled things and it worked out, for the most part, okay. I used to envy my brothers. Those older brothers that I mentioned. They seemed to have limitless access to book and news and daily goings on and I always felt that they didn’t fully appreciate how great a world they had. They were not as engaged as they should have been, but they were willing to share a lot of information with me which I appreciated but I really bridled at not being able to have full access to information and to all of the printed stuff that was around. I loved going to the library and hated going to the library at the same time because I knew there was all of this tantalizingly close boos and things that I could read, or should be able to read, but I couldn’t unfortunately.
Paul Schroeder:
Well, we’re getting ever closer to that day when information is at our fingertips, in our technologies and fully available to those of us who are blind and it is thanks to, again, a lot of the work of people in this room and a lot of the organizations that have made that happen. And I’m thrilled that I’ve been able to play the roles that I can with working on policies and now working with a company that its whole mission is to make access to visual information its core activity and so one of the things that saddens me the most, and I hear this fairly often for people who use Aira, is a blind person who is afraid to venture forth, to go out into the world to do something that they wanted to do. And I’m thrilled that we’re helping some conquer that barrier and I hope the we will be able to continue to do that so that people will not only wipe away the fear, to be able to move forward in the world, but will because of that, tackle other things that have been holding them back as a successful blind person. And use those other tools that are available.
Paul Schroeder:
We must all take action to shatter those shackles that are constructed from fear. They are so ever present for those of us who are blind or visually impaired or those around us. I applaud the National Federation of the Blind for building centers for excellence in blindness skill development and for the efforts to really focus on young people and the opportunities to explore and test their limits. I applaud ACB for working to ensure that the technologies that we use every day in our lives, to helping to shape those technologies to be more accessible from policy and other work. As I mentioned, I am a curious person. I like to know what’s around and so, one of my constant refrains when I’m out with my family was, “What’s over there?” And some of you may have heard this before. When we would go to a mall and I would point to what’s over there, it was invariably a Vitoria’s Secret, because they assumed rightly that I didn’t wanna go. So malls, as far as I could tell, were filled with Victoria’s Secrets and Navy Loft. Those were the two things … and that’s actually not too far from true, but I thought it can’t be that many. I was thrilled when I got Aira that I could in fact know what was over there and get access to those signs and information that otherwise wouldn’t have been available and that my family was obviously lying to me about.
Paul Schroeder:
We’ve still got lots of battles and struggles to face. Education. We’ve got to fight to ensure that our schools can ensure braille training, materials in accessible formats, orientational mobility training, independent living skills, self-advocacy, go down the line. We’re not there yet. Our seniors, it’s heartbreaking how little our society delivers for those who lose their sight with age. For heavens sakes, the independent Working Services for older blind funding is still where we all left it in 2000 when we had a concerted effort which I was very proud to be part of at the American Foundation for the Blind to help those appropriate levels. It’s criminal.
Paul Schroeder:
But perhaps nothing is more distressing than where we are with employment. The attitudes, the tech, the training, the work flow and on and on. Things that we have not yet conquered that keep us from succeeding where we want to be with employment and that’s obviously the goal everyone in this room really is devoted to. My boss at Aira, Suman Kanuganti set an ambitious goal because tech started to do weird things lie that. To take the unemployment rate from 70% down to 7%. Now I try to explain to him that the unemployment rate is not really 70% but it didn’t matter it was more the alliteration I guess and the goal that mattered. It doesn’t matter. I love the fact that he really wanted to tackle something big. To make a dent in this critical effort that has gone on for far too long is something that we have not succeeded.
Paul Schroeder:
Aira’s not gonna do that alone because it’s not the only barrier. The visual information barrier is not the only barrier that we face of course, but they are critical barriers and I’m excited that we’re going to have the opportunity to learn a lot more through Aira and I hope you are too, about the kids of inaccessibility that people face in the work force, in the employment area because we’re going to know about the kids of challenges that people are using Aira to tackle in terms of access to visual information. We’re going to have insights about inaccessible software and tools and technology. We’re going to learn something about training gaps and what we should focus on.
Paul Schroeder:
We’re not there yet, in terms of how to deal with or address the data and we don’t have enough people focused on employment yet with Aira. But I’m excited about that. It’s often said that you can learn more from losing or failing hat you can from success. To which I say, I should be really wise at this point in my life. Not so much. We’ve lost a lot of battles but learned a lot of good lessons in the process. I like to pick on my wife with this story. I came home once from yet another time where one of our issues had gotten defeated and she said, “don’t you ever get tired of losing?”. Are you kidding, I love losing. This is what keeps me employed. I wouldn’t be here. And so, she’s always embarrassed when I tell that story but the point was right. It is frustrating, it is hard it is hard to sometimes get back up and yet we have to do that on the grand scale when our policies don’t work out. We have to do that and the micro scale when the people we’re working with get hit with a loss in something that didn’t work out.
Paul Schroeder:
As I said earlier, you’ve been granted that authority of position, the expectation of leadership, the responsibility that comes with this role to do what you can to keep this fight alive. As I wrap up, one of the quotes that I really loved was for the 1980 convention speech that Ted Kennedy gave. As you may remember, for those of us who are old enough, he fought in the primaries to unseat the incumbent president Jimmy Carter. He didn’t succeed, but he said this, “For all of those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream will never die” and that’s I think the more we need to take to heart and if you want to take it down to the service level, I’ll leave you with the word of Guy Clarke who got his song from his wife, “You gotta sing like you don’t need the money, love like you’ve never been hurt, you gotta dance like nobody’s watching, it’s gotta come from the heart if you want it to work”. Thanks so much.
Jeff Thompson:
Thank you Paul.
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